“You will marry that poor girl, then?”
“Yes.”
“Aha! did not I always say he was a good fellow? Clench the nail; give me your honor.”
“I give you my honor to marry her, if I live.”
“You take a load off me; may Heaven reward you. In one hour those poor women, whose support I had promised to be, will lose their protector; but I give them another in you. We shall not leave that family in tears, Rose in shame, and your child without a name.”
Dujardin stared at the speaker. What new and devilish deception was this?
“My child!” he faltered. “What child?”
“Ah,” said Raynal, “what a fool I was! That is the first thing I ought to have told you. Poor little fellow! I surprised him in his cradle; his mother and Josephine were rocking him, and singing over him. Oh! it was a scene, I can tell you. My poor wife had been ill for some time, and was so weakened by it, that I frightened her into a fit, stealing a march on her that way. She fainted away. Perhaps it is as well she did; for I—I did not know what to think; it looked ugly; but while she lay at our feet insensible, I forced the truth from Rose; she owned the boy was hers.”
While Raynal told him this strange story, Camille turned hot and cold. First came a thrill of glowing joy; he had some clew to all this: he was a father; that child was Josephine’s and his; the next moment he froze within. So Josephine had not only gulled her husband, but him, too; she had refused him the sad consolation of knowing he had a child. Cruelty, calculation, and baseness unexampled! Here was a creature who could sacrifice anything and anybody to her comfort, to the peace and sordid smoothness of her domestic life. She stood between two men—a thing. Between two truths—a double lie.
His heart, in one moment, turned against her like a stone. A musket-bullet through the body does not turn life to death quicker than Raynal turned his rival’s love to despair and scorn: that love which neither wounds, absence, prison, nor even her want of constancy had prevailed to shake.